


House of Ghosts

by watcherofworlds



Category: Agent Carter (TV), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Angst, Grief/Mourning, Headcanon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-10
Updated: 2016-08-10
Packaged: 2018-08-07 23:53:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,017
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7734724
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/watcherofworlds/pseuds/watcherofworlds
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Peggy visits the apartment building where Steve used to live with Bucky because she happens to be in the neighborhood, and discovers something about Steve's past that only makes his loss that much more painful.</p>
            </blockquote>





	House of Ghosts

Peggy paused, the echo of the clack of her high heels on the sidewalk continuing on for a few minutes after she’d stopped walking before finally petering out. She had never been on this street before, but something about it felt strangely familiar. When she saw the number on the building nearest her, she understood. She was standing in front of Steve’s apartment building. She recognized the address from his Project Rebirth file.

She crossed the building’s courtyard and stopped at the bottom of the stairs that wound their way around the outside of  it, presumably how its occupants accessed their apartments. Taking a deep breath, she began to climb them. They were old and rickety and creaked beneath her feet, an indication of the general state of the building. When she reached an apartment number she recognized, she stopped. She tried the door. It was locked, and she didn’t quite understand why she’d thought for even a second that it wouldn’t be. She reached behind her head for a hairpin with which to pick the lock, but paused when she noticed the brick sitting near the edge of the landing on which she stood, looking conspicuously out of place. She nudged it aside with her foot and found a key lying beneath it.

“Steve!” she said as if he were beside her, as if he could hear her, her tone affectionately exasperated. “That’s a terrible place to hide a key!” She put the key in the lock and turned it, and when she pushed on the door it swung open easily.

Peggy slipped through the now open door. Even her breathing felt too loud in the still, quiet space, filled with dust and cobwebs and the ghosts of the past. She sat down on the couch, which let out a puff of dust like an exhale, and put her face in her hands.What was she even doing here? What had she expected to find, some kind of message from Steve explaining why he had left her? She laughed quietly at her own weakness and stood. There was a framed photograph of a man in a military uniform on the rickety coffee table nearby, a old, battered copy of  _ The Once and Future King _ beside it. Across the tiny living room was a bookshelf filled to bursting with books of all kinds. The man in the photograph was a stranger to her, but there was something about him that reminded her of Steve. She wondered if he was his father.

Even though Peggy knew, because Steve had told her, that he had lived here with Bucky, as she explored the rest of the apartment she noticed signs of Steve everywhere, but found hardly anything to indicate Bucky had been there all, aside from some clothes folded up in a dresser in one of the bedrooms and a notebook sitting on the kitchen table that had the name James Barnes written on the inside cover. Finally only one room-the second bedroom-remained unexplored. She stepped inside cautiously and did a double take. The walls of the room were covered in drawings of a woman, the same woman over and over again. Her hair was lighter, straw instead of sand, and her eyes were the clear, crystalline blue of a summer sky rather than the blue-gray of a partly cloudy sky, but there was so much of Steve in her face and her smile and her eyes that Peggy knew the woman in the drawings had to be his mother, the mother she’d never quite worked up the courage to ask him about.

She felt a tear slide down her cheek as she realized that colored pencils didn’t come in those colors, that pale straw yellow or that brilliant crystalline blue, and that to get them Steve must have spent hours placing layers of colors on top of each other, and she could imagine him squeezing his eyes shut to try and hold the image of his mother in his mind. Another realization followed on the heels of the first- most of the drawings were hung right at her eye level, which meant they would have been out of Steve’s reach, which meant that he hadn’t been the one who had put them there, and she was crying in earnest now because she knew that only grief would have prompted Steve to draw his mother so obsessively and to put so much effort into drawing her. She knew this because he had done something similar when Bucky had died-she’d caught a glimpse of his notebook shortly before his crash, and its pages had been filled with drawings of his lost friend-and now she knew that Steve had made those drawings after his mother had died, and that Bucky had hung them in what she now knew to be Steve’s bedroom so that he would never have to worry about forgetting her. 

The tears were coming thick and hot and fast now, stinging her eyes. She started taking the drawings down off the walls, because she knew that if Steve ever came back he would want them, and she couldn’t bear the thought of what might happen to them if she left them here. She wept at the unfairness of it all, and with grief for Steve and for Bucky and for this woman she had never met, and suddenly it felt like the walls were closing in on her, and she had to get out of there before she lost it completely. She went around the apartment gathering up the rest of the drawings, because they were in everywhere-in the hall, in the kitchen, in the living room- and as she stumbled toward the front door she grabbed the book and the photograph off the coffee table, though she couldn’t have said why, and emerged out into the bright, hard, cruel world, the world that went on turning despite the fact that the man she loved was gone, and there was nothing left of him but old newsreels and a dusty apartment and painful memories that haunted her sleep.


End file.
